"I could have," Altman replied. " H th " e says you were ere. 'Well, good for me." H . d " Wh ' , e contInue , en M*A*S*H opened" -according to the Times re- view, "the first American movie openly to ridicule belief in God"-"my father called his sister, my aunt Pauline, and said, 'Don't go to that movie. That's a dirty movie Bob's made.' " Altman grew up in Kansas City. Asked when he last visited there, he consulted his wife: "Kathryn, when did my father die?" The answer was 1979, but he was forgetting the six weeks on location in 1995 shooting "Kansas City," a Depression-era story with approxi- mately the same quotient of music as "A Prairie Home Companion." "I didn't really know anyone in Kan- sas City by then," he said. "But I still hear from people there from time to time. I get letters. 'Herè s a thing that happened; they'll say. 'I've got a story for you. Why don't you make a movie out of this?' " He paused and shook his head. "People think you just go make a movie." -Mark Singer HAMPTONS POSTCARD EZ-HOAX ....- .. . - S helter Island's first inhabitants, the Manhanset Indians, called their home Manhansack-aha-quash-awomack, which means "an island sheltered by islands"- or, in other words, "take a boat or swim." At least since the days of Nathaniel Syl- vester and his teen-age wife, Grissel, who survived a shipwreck on their way from Barbados in 1652, travellers to the area have been content to rely on the former method of conveyance, which, while not free or available at whim, claims the ad- vantages of dispatch and dryness. Comers and goers have their choice of two ferries, one to Greenport and the other to North Haven. Each shoves off every fifteen or so minutes and costs around ten dollars. Native Shelter Islanders are bred to regard the exigencies of the ferry schedwe with less annoyance than with pride; in homage to their ability to run like rabbits for the docks, they're known as "hareleg- gers." "The same thing that happened to Staten Island would happen to us," Ar- thur Bloom, a sixth-generation resident, said the other day, at the thought of con- structing automobile-friendly points of egress. On the other hand, the "touris- tas," as Bloom calls them, "move here because of its charm and seclusion, then cry out for a bridge so that they will not be so isolated." Bloom is the Recording Secretary, Director of Safety & Security, Rodent Mitigation Officer, and chef de cuisine of the Shelter Island Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which, of course, does not exist except in his very enterprising imagination. One afternoon a couple of years ago, Bloom, who is semi-retired from his job as a telephone repairman, was hanging around with some friends, 'Just think- ing about how to try to mess with the tourists' heads." They decided that a good way to "have a laugh around town amongst the local goobers" would be to pretend that there were easier ways to get on and off the island-i.e., the "Stir- ling Memorial TunneY' and the "Sunrise Bridge." The result was a fictitious transit agency that, with the hermetic exacting- ness of a Christmas village or a Monop- oly board, included details like "EZ- Path" express lanes and its own motto, "Nulla tenaci invia est via" ("For the te- nacious, no road is impassable"). Bloom got some SIBTA bumper stickers printed up and built a Web site. In March, he received an e-mail from Jim Crawford, the director of the E-Z Pass Interagency Group. Crawford, who had been tipped off by a member of a toll-agency trade organization, cc'd a Port Authority lawyer and another official with the ominous-sounding do- main address "@turnpike.state.nj. us." "Do you have an electronic toll collection system?" Crawford wrote. "Are the signs shown on your home page . . . showing one of your facilities?" He was referring to a photograph of the Lincoln Tunnel. Bloom had pulled it off the Internet to illustrate his Stirling Memorial Tunnel, which, according to a caption, is built "in the style of the Hypernatremian Tun- nel, which connects the villages of Er- satz and Bogusse." No, you idiot, Bloom thought, as he read the e-mail. It' s your tunnel! "I printed the e-mail out," Bloom said, "and took it down to the bar and showed everybody, and they were just rolling on the floor. I said, 'What am I going to do?' and the guys said, 'You've got him hooked. Well, now you've got to reel him . , " In. Bloom enlisted a retired lawyer friend, and the two wrote, on dummied-up SIBT A stationery, to say that they would accept correspondence only via U.S. Mail. Two weeks later, they received a letter from the Port Authority attorney, George Sny- der, who objected, among other things, to their play on the E- ZPass service mark, which, "as you are undoubtedly aware;' he wrote, "[is] exceedinglywell-known-in- deed, famous." He continued: Both EZ-Path and the E-ZPass marks begin with the "E-Z" prefix followed by a word of which the first two letters are "PA." Furthermore, the "TH" sound at the end of your organization's mark is not unlike the "55" sound at the end of our client's. Snyder also suggested that SIBT A was in violation of rules governing the use of certain typefaces and the color purple. "All they have to do is look at the words on the Web site," Bloom said. "It's all nonsense! It's all bullshit!" For instance, Southfork Construction, Utilities, Maintenance, Bridging, and Grading-the company that supposedly built the Sunrise Bridge-abbreviates to form the acronym SCUMBAG. That bridge, accordingly, lies within Peconic County, Bloom's own Yoknapatawpha. And positions in SIBT A's civil-service arm are filled by an exam that's administered every hundred years, or, in non-centenary times, by hereditary succession. Crawford, after being alerted, over the phone the other day, to the fact that SIBT A was a hoax, was not mollified. 'We don't take lightly people going around and putting the E-ZPass name wher- ever they want to put it;' he said. "People who are not in on the joke may be misled to the point of assuming that certain ser- vices are available when they're not." He went on, "It's an insult to the Port Au- thority, quite frankly." In the wake of Crawford's e-mail, SIBT A has retired "EZ- Path," in favor of the slogan, in yellow font, "EZcome- EZgo." This resolution was passed at an April 15th meeting of the SIBT A board of directors. It was held in Suite 100, Mezzanine Level, of the New Prospect Hotel, which burned down in 1942. -Lauren Collins THE NEW YORKER, MAY 22, 2006 31